Bradford County's great beauty is getting drilled

TOWN SQUARE

There were far more tanker trucks than cars on some of the roads around Troy and Canton on Sunday, representing signs of change in Bradford County, which has had more hydraulic fracturing gas well drilling than any other county in Pennsylvania.

The day began with gorgeous weather and Chuck Berry lyrics dancing in my head, with no particular place to go, so I rambled north on my two-wheeler. In no time at all I was on Route 6 and decided to point the Yamaha toward Wyalusing, where there are two overlooks high above the Susquehanna River, including one where you can gaze down on French Azilum.

That is where royalists sought out the most beautiful spot in America to build a refuge for Marie Antoinette, but she never made it. She lost her head over the French Revolution. That is, her head lost her.

As long as I was in Bradford County, where we lived in the late 1960s and early 1970s when I worked at The Daily Review in Towanda, I decided I may as well cruise around, although I had great trepidation.

I thought about the first time I saw Los Angeles, in 1946 in the back seat of my grandfather's Hudson. In some areas there were forests of oil well derricks for miles. After living in lovely San Diego, it was one of the most frightening things I ever saw.

From what I read about gas wells inundating Bradford County, which I had known as one of the most beautiful parts of Pennsylvania, that's what I anticipated. It was not as bad as I expected, but it was bad enough in the western parts of the county.

One huge and hideous gas well derrick east of Canton is painted red, white and blue, which I took as an attempt by the gas industry robber barons of Texas and Oklahoma to pretend they are patriotic.

There are gas drilling operations visible all over the spectacular hills and mountains of that area, but not forests of them. Significantly more shocking were the trucks, providing ample proof that something dramatic is happening there.

Last year, Pennsylvania Department of Transportation data revealed that truck traffic on Route 6 in Bradford County was 10 times as heavy as the average over the previous five years. On Sunday, it was much worse on other roads than on Route 6.

Convoys of tanker trucks carrying the toxic gunk used in hydraulic fracturing clogged the roads on that lovely Sunday. In one area I counted a dozen tankers for every car. I followed one convoy from western Bradford County, down into the wilds of Sullivan County, and then into Wyoming County before I gave up trying to find out where they were going to unload it.

I mentioned my concerns about the county's fading beauty to Diane Ward of Standing Stone, near Wyalusing. She is a retired chemical engineer who has turned into an activist because of the gas drilling.

"Beauty is only skin deep," she said. "What we have to worry about is the water."

That took me to Don Miles of Bethlehem, a lawyer who heads the Sierra Club's Lehigh Valley chapter and who has written about the issue in The Morning Call.

"There are thousands of them," he said of Bradford County's swarms of tanker trucks. "Each well needs 5 million gallons of water. ... They [the gas drillers] claim they're reclaiming the water," but Miles and other environmentalists suspect that under Gov. Tom Corbett, there is little or no state regulation to see that they actually do that.

As I've reported before, Corbett gave drillers everything they wanted after that industry gave him $1 million in so-called "political campaign contributions." His accommodations included a decision to make Pennsylvania the only gas-producing state in America that does not charge a severance tax on the extracted gas.

The tanker trucks, said Travis Windle, a press spokesman for the Marcellus Shale Coalition, the lobbying and public relations arm of the gas industry, "typically haul water, and sometimes they haul sand."

The water, I asked, is the hydraulic fracturing solution?

"It's 99.5 percent water and sand," Windle insisted.

That leaves only one-half of a percent of other stuff, but it is potent enough to break up vast subterranean rock formations so they release huge volumes of gas. That makes some worrywarts fear that it might be potent enough to taint drinking water, so I asked where the trucks were going with it.

"I can't tell you where every truck is going," Windle said, getting a little testy, but he said the trucks probably were heading for a recycling facility to purify the water.

Previously there were complaints that drillers simply dumped the solutions into sewage treatment plants, which could not handle such toxins, and the gunk was then simply dumped into major rivers. Windle assured me such things do not happen any more. "We're not discharging this" into the environment, he said.

I asked Miles about that. "I hope it's not going into the streams of Pennsylvania, but I think it might be," he said.

All that aside, I am happy to report that Bradford County, most of it, is still spectacularly beautiful, unlike the L.A. of 1946, although I fear that may change if the industry gives Corbett a few more million. If you visit, just be careful where you get your drinking water, and allow extra time for getting stuck behind trucks.